There is a space that artists depend upon to make their art. This space is located in between. It is a middle ground, a transition space, a place of pause, a place to wait, to test, and then move beyond. It’s open.

In the space of art dwells the “mind of don’t know.” The “empty” mind is the creative mind. In the process of art-making the artist does not know the outcome, what the work of art will look like, or even be. It is a process with shifts and changes, of simultaneously seeing and finding a new way, staying open to what you don’t know and haven’t seen. This space of art is a mental space in which we see things as if for the first time.

To ready the mind requires not just practice but assuming a practice. For the artist, the word “practice” in contemporary usage has professional implications. Also since the 1960s when the discipline identity of artworks became expanded and eroded, “practice” became a more useful term than other more limited labels. But I would add practice as a daily routine and, even more, a life’s path, describing the artist’s way of working—a way of being—that is integral and ongoing.

Practice is about trying, developing, cultivating, improving. Practice connotes repetition: to practice, to perfect. Practice becomes the rituals of life, continual acts of doing. And making art is, for artists, a way of life.

Artmaking is above all a process of inquiry. To launch into and carry out a process without a stated outcome is to allow that process of inquiry to unfold; to trust that the right way will arise; to wait, persevering through a blank open space, looking for guideposts, listening with a level of perception that enables us to move in ways we would not have found outside this process. So to negotiate the space of art requires focused thought in order to identity the “why” of art before the “what” or “how,” to clarify the aims and come to know the essence before knowing the form. What is this process? How does it happen?

A deep awareness of the processes of art—of one’s self in the process—is key to creation. So, the artist’s mind-in-making is not just the result of studied knowledge (getting the facts straight) or skills acquired; it is always determined by the actual process of making and the depth of awareness one brings to bear during that process. This awareness is what moves beyond the known for the self, then for us as viewers, and potentially for the society or culture at large. And the work of art derives its “presence” from this heightened awareness—from the artist’s presence of mind.

I want to call upon the work and words of some artists who have cultivated clarity of aim in their intent and sense of focus and, from this presence of mind, created works that mark breakthroughs in art practice.  Their work, preeminent among contemporary projects, serves us well in enabling an atmosphere, fostering our aim of contemplation, and allowing us to be present with and in art.

Michael Rotondi is a practicing architect who participated in 2003 in a collaboration that led to the work From the Verandah: Art, Buddhism, Presence—at once a work and the backdrop for other work.1 In carrying this out, he kept in mind: “If we value the viewer as not empty, but instead make an empty, open and expansive space—and exhibitions can be one of these generous spaces—then the fullness of the visitor’s experience (rather than the museum’s or sponsor’s or curator’s experience) can fill that space, fill it with the experience of art. We were interested in what would happen if, when people left the room, they could only describe the experience and not the “object.”  Their memory would be of a process (personal experience) not the product (the constructed verandah) if the thing itself had presence but was relatively neutral, if it was a way of modulating space as opposed to putting an object in the space. We wanted to give equal status to the experience of matter and light.  Movement would be modulated, the body in space, moving and at rest would be our frame of reference.  The thing wouldn’t really exist except for the reflection of the light off all the surfaces. And it worked.”2

For Rirkrit Tiravanija, who creates exchanges that allow participants to become the work, the method of practice is fluid, living, a place of possibility: “Keeping it blank, because then you can receive more, you are able to be more receptive to your own experience…maybe not to make or to rethink experience, but to deal with the question of judgment: how one can become open to other experiences, to surpass our own experiences, and experience the idea of others, otherness.  I feel we have to open up museums again; there are so many regulations, so much fear to make a real experience.”  

Marina Abramovic, in speaking about her performance achievement, The House with the Ocean View in which she lived in a gallery space for twelve days, said: “I created space with no time. I created the feeling of here and now. You know how people go through galleries…three minutes here, two minutes there, just go in and out…I had people staying. I had the people who would come every single day, some for hours; some sat there for five hours.  I had people going to work with their briefcases who would wait in the front of the gallery for it to open, just to be there, like addicts, just to have that gaze, and then go out into the world, because out of that they can get something.  It was amazing because I had an incredible feeling of unconditional love toward any person who came there and wanted to look at me in the eyes. Nobody was looking at them the way I look at them, unconditionally.”  Abramovic realized and acknowledged that this work was completely dependent on the public: “the public and I actually made the piece. Without the public, the piece doesn't exist, so they filled it.”  She finds her function as an artist to be important, useful, and her message to be located “in the context of the heart of the audience.”  And while the experience during her performances is profound for her, she knows it is transforming for the visitor, too: “they take what they need for their own life to enlarge awareness… I give art unconditionally so that it might have its own function in the lives of everybody.”

In video, Bill Viola creates time.  Too, he understands that experiences he creates respond to the need in our world for quiet time to reflect and re-center:  “We must take time back into ourselves, let our consciousness breathe and our cluttered minds be still and silent,” he admonished, offering, “This is what art can do and what museums can be in today’s world.”

Kimsooja creates works in real time, performances which she re-presents to us, often as video.  A Laundry Woman (2000) was filmed next to the cremation site in India on the Yamura River.  In this experience, which we as viewer partake of as well, she had a transformative revelation as she looked at the floating images on the surface of the river that were flowers and debris: “While I was facing the river,” she said, “I was actually looking at anonymous people’s life and death, including my own. It was a purifying experience.  There’s a lot of detail on the surface of the river, but it’s all reflections…the river is a mirror of reality…I decided to be there until the limit of my body, an hour in total.  In the middle of this, I was completely confused: is it the river that is moving, or myself? My sense of time and space were turned completely upside-down. I was asking and asking over and over, is it the river moving or me? I finally realized that it is the river that is changing all the time in front of this still body…my body will be changed and vanish soon, but the river will remain, moving slowly, as it is now…the changing of our body into the state of death is like floating on the river of the universe.”

The process of viewing art, like the process of creativity—being in the space of art-making—is risky, unsettling, troubling. So to practice, we need to be able “to rest in our own experience of discomfort” as we work in a territory that is new and, for us, previously unexplored. And through practice, to overcome the anxiety of not knowing and develop a capacity for uncertainty, hence the space of art needs to be a safe space in which the artist—and then the viewer—can operate. By safe space I do not mean one that is cozy or luxurious. It is a safety net for the mind as it stays open, unknowing, floating in a zone of instability.

As a curator, I see my primary role as creating such a safe, critically challenging, creative place in which artists can practice, making art—in which viewers can experience art.  I have now practiced curating outside of museums for as long as I did within them. In the course of my practice, I have found the nature of making site-specific projects to be one in which the need to employ the mind of “don’t know” is evident and essential. Since the mid-1980s many artists have incorporated site-specificity into their art practice. They have responded with sensitivity to new contexts and embraced their own status as outsiders as one full of potential for creativity. They have participated in a process founded on not knowing and its corollary: listening—to communities, to a place, to themselves—as they come to understand what it is to be in a place, not be from that place. They literally see things for the first time. When artists listen to and share experiences with keen attention to a site and all that it implies, when they are present in a place and in a process, then extraordinary and unexpected works emerge. And bringing others into these processes artists sustain the presence of others in the space of art-making.

It is art’s quality of presence that draws us in, commanding our attention and inspiring us to look more deeply. The viewer’s response to a work’s presence is sometimes dependent on the work’s familiarity, its resonance with our own experience. Yet it is also at times its unfamiliarity that has the most profound impact on our experience. “To some degree we become artists ourselves as we undertake this integration,” John Dewey tells us, through perception “our own experience is re-oriented. And it is this experience that is more effective because it enters directly into attitude.”3 So the experience of art can be a transformational experience.

In this way art can be a powerful manifestation of our interconnectedness, and when we understand in a deep and pervasive way our interconnectedness, compassion flows. The individual transmission of thought that a work of art embodies is a connecting thread that is greater than the individual. We can cultivate “our capacity to be with suffering as it arises by developing our ability to be in attention present when we are fully conscious and present in the moment, we can be in the field of energy shared with others, put ourselves in another’s shoes. . .and have the skillfulness to develop the capacity to experience another person’s suffering.”4 So art is one way to develop our capacity for being with suffering, our own and that of others.

And as Kimsooja stands down-river from a cremation site and thinks, “Is it the river that is moving, or myself?” Bill Viola regenerates the image of a man through fire and water and Marina Abramovic transmits energy between herself and her audiences. These artists communicate palpably to us in ways that are beyond themselves so that we can move beyond ourselves too.

Notes:
1. From the Verandah was organized by the UCLA Fowler Museum, the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles, and was presented at the Fowler from October 2003 - January 2004. The experimental installation emerged from the year-long collaboration of a creative team, led by Michael Rotondi and Hirokazu Kosaka but also including curators and educators from both Museums as well as a Buddhist priest, a composer, and a dancer/choreographer.

2. This and all artists’ quotations following are from Buddha Mind and Contemporary Art, eds. Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004). 

3. John Dewey, “Art as Experience,” in Stanley Rosen, ed., The Philosopher’s Handbook (New York: Random House, 2000), 281. 

4. Yvonne Rand quoted in Mary Jane Jacob, “In the Space of Art,” in Buddha Mind and Contemporary Art, eds. Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004).